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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 3, 2025

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The average age at first marriage in the US is 30.5 for men, and 28.6 for women, which is close enough to 30-30, IMO.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/371933/median-age-of-us-americans-at-their-first-wedding/

South Korea is further down the same road, at 33.8 and 31.5.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1112935/south-korea-median-age-at-first-marriage-by-gender/

This is a significant increase from mid-century stats, which were around 22.5 for men and 20 for women in 1950.

When the good professor was writing, the American average was 26 and 22.

https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizations/time-series/demo/families-and-households/ms-2.pdf

Age gap marriages of 10 years or more constitute 9.3% of marriages, almost all of them an older man and younger woman.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_disparity_in_sexual_relationships

If you go 30 man, 24 woman, which is a big gap, that constitutes 20.5 percent of marriages. If you also include the vice versa relationship of older woman, younger man, that gets you 23.3 of all marriages.

It turns out when women have control over who they marry, rather than being coerced by threat of economic destitution, they tend to prefer men around their own age.

There is a huge confounder to this statement, which is that even in the Canadian doctor’s era, forced or arranged marriages were exceedingly rare, indicating that women did in fact have choices about who they married.

Additionally, the propaganda and societal pressure that women receive advocates much more strongly for 22+ years of education for women, for having a long-term stable career before getting married, and against motherhood.

In a hypothetical world where women were just as free as they are now, but with the propaganda and societal pressure of 1905, we can, I believe, properly assume a very different age ratio and time to first marriage.